Google Web Toolkit adds HTML5 canvas backing

Plus: JetBrains releases PHPStorm 2.0

Google yesterday upgraded GWT (Google Web Toolkit) to add support for HTML5. On the same day JetBrains added to its PHP IDE.

With GWT 2.2, for building browser applications, Google is including support for HTML5-specific features, such as the canvas 2D element and the embedding of audio and video tags. "These APIs are still experimental and may change a bit over the next couple of releases, but we feel that they're stable enough to deserve some real mileage [by you]," said Chris Ramsdale, of Google Developer Tools Team, in a blog post.

But GWT version 2.2 (Zip file) will have only deprecated support for Java 1.5, resulting in warnings when building applications. "While Java 1.5 will still work for this release of GWT, developers should upgrade their version of Java to correct these warnings and ensure compatibility with future versions of GWT," said Ramsdale.

Google is also offering Google Plugin for Eclipse 2.2, which integrates the GWT Designer AJAX user interface designer. Google Plugin for Eclipse makes it easy to deploy and run applications on the Google App Engine cloud platform, Google claimed.

Version 1.4.2 of the App Engine SDK, released late last week, features an improved XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) API to help applications better interact with users, Google said. With XMPP, notifications are sent when users sign in and out. The application can set presence details for a user. Task Queue performance and Task Queue API improvements in version 1.4.2, meanwhile, include increasing the rate at which tasks can be processed to 100 tasks per second.

An API added in the new version of App Engine allows for programmatically deleting tasks instead of managing this manually from the admin console.

JetBrains upgrades PHP IDE

Meanwhile, JetBrains is releasing its PHPStorm 2.0 PHP IDE. It features support for PHP 5.3 namespaces and closures, ECMAscript 5, and Less and SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) extensions for cascading style seets. Less features a dynamic stylesheet language while SASS extends CSS with nested rules, variables, and other features.

Version 2.0 also has a streamlined UI. Debugging has been improved with a zero-configuration debugger, JetBrains said. More code inspection is featured as well as automatic code completion and Github repository and Mercurial source code management integrations. Editors are included for SQL queries.